Would be a way to sneak in speeding tickets with no extra roadside equipment except a camera to identify the speeder.
A related use would be to tell cops where "speeding hot spots" are, so they can go hide there.
Really, this technology doesn't scare me very much. It's nothing they couldn't already do. Even the Libertarian in me has a hard time getting too riled up over this. There are bigger battles to fight than this.
Also, for some reason a whole lot of "single site" or "very limited distribution" stuff gets on bugtraq.
There are about 6 million php blog/message board packages out there, and 5.99 million of them are coded with no security in mind. I probably get 5 messages a week that are just some stupid SQL injection attack to fooPHPblogger 0.59 alpha.
I'm sure that if you count all that stuff, Linux looks much worse off.
MS could have documentation that is just as good, and contextual like a squid conf file.
The problem is that people stop clicking the question mark cursor (contextual help) after doing it about 10 times and getting "This is a text box, you enter text into it" or "click the check box to toggle this option on or off".
So, IMO, it's not so much that they can't, it's that they don't.
I still have not seen you show the GPL to restrict "use" of the software, your argument seems to be that "distribution" is a "use", which is pretty weak, a word game.
The definitions of "use" and "distribution" that are commonly used in relation to the GPL, are the same ones that are under copyright law. Basically, suppose the software were distributed "All Rights Reserved", with no license for use, only the fully restricted copyright. Anything that you could do legally without special permission from the author in the "All Rights Reserved" case, are things you can do without agreeing to the GPL.
This includes using the software, insofar as running the software, which produces a temporary copy in RAM. You would own any output of the program, so long as the output from the program did not contain substantial portions of the program's own source. (That only happens in rare cases)
You would be restricted from any redistribution of the software by normal copyright laws. The GPL is your sole grant to redistribution, and only comes into play when you would be getting into territory that is covered by normal copyright law.
Be careful, their constitution offer no guarantees of freedom. Their freedom is solely by the good graces of their government, and could be removed at any time.
As opposed to the US, where our constitution guarantees freedom, and congress just ignores it most of the time.:)
I should qualify my statement, in my opinion, McVoy is an idiot for calling his target customers "whiners".
I did not mean that as a general statement about his intelligence.:)
The rest of your points are taken, although I still do not agree with the BKL, I find it an intolerable license, and it scares me that kernel development is happening in BK.
. If you want to use, say, [GPL'd] Readline in your program, then your program must be licensed under the GPL
Yep, because then you are no longer just using the software, you are distributing it, in part, which means you have to agree with and abide by the GPL. When you link to the library (at least statically), you include parts of the code in your program. Dynamically linking is a little less clear cut, but generally, you are still distributing a work that is derived from GPL code.
Most libraries are LGPL anyway, which doesn't have this restriction.
Let's say I wrote some serious mathematical library software, and released it for general use. And let's say that the license I wrote included a clause that said the government of the People's Republic of China may not use my software for the purposes of decrypting communications.
Yes, any EULA that restricts the rights of the end user in ways other than distribution is potentially very dangerous.
But people everyday here write how they oppose protections for copyrighted material like movies and music.
Don't mind those people. Also don't assume that people who advocate free software are always of that belief. We aren't all communist. I'd even go as far to say the real communists are in the minority.
I admit there is a lot wrong with our current system of copyright, but I am not in favor of eliminating it, and I don't think many reasonable people are. Most of us do want to see widespread IP reform, but eliminating all IP is not the goal for most of us.
Plenty of companies don't have repugnant EULAs that restrict how you use their software.
Note that this is very different from the normal EULA that disclaims liability and describes how many computers you are allowed to install the program on, and things like that.
Look, it is as simple as this: you don't like the copy protection, patent protection, whatever you have every choice NOT to buy or watch or listen to a product
All Stallman is doing in this case is showing people the consequences of choosing to use this product.
No one (no reasonable person at least) is expecting or asking McVoy to open source his product. Sure, it would be a good way to end this mess, but it's more reasonable to just stop using his closed product.
No one ever said you couldn't use closed source software, we just want to make sure that people understand the inherent risk in any closed solution with bad EULAs.
BK is not preventing Redhat, Suse, Mandrake (et al) employees from using BitKeeper, only those who actively develop Subversion or arch
It's not that they are, it's that they could.
EULAs that dictate terms of use of software (as opposed to EULAs that only address distribution), and companies that support those kind of EULAs, and a very dangerous thing.
Calling your customer "whiners" is always a sure bet.
Larry McVoy of BitKeeper:
"Our position: "1) No free licenses for our competition, they can buy them if they like. "2) The software is not open source because the open source business model doesn't have a prayer of supporting the development costs. "3) If you had built a decent system instead of sitting around and whining, we could be doing something else instead of sitting around listening to your whining."
He doesn't give a flying fuck about open source, he only wants to sell his product. People like this are the opposite of the open source philosophy.
Stallman was sort of out of place bringing this up again on the LKML, which is supposed to be about technical discussion, but his points are, as always, valid.
You are correct, and also, executables will be larger in RAM in a truely RISC environment, since more instructions are required to accomplish the same thing.
I used to know this, but the naming convention came around sometime in the early 50s or late 40s. There were A, B, C, D dry cells, and then those big tall 8 inch ones that were about 2 inches around, they had some name also. I believe it was set up by the government in some capacity, possibly the military. Could be wrong.
As far as why "A" then "AA", then "AAA" this probably comes from the way that guages are measured. As guage gets larger, you get closer to 0, then you have 00, 000, 0000. It was probably the same line of thought that cause the creater of the first battery smaller than the A to name it AA. Just speculation, but it makes sense.
This link explains what happened to the "B" cell:
http://exn.ca/Stories/1998/06/16/51.asp
Couldn't find much else on Google, because battery is such a common word, and "dry cell" gets you lots of biology links.
You never replied to my message about DRM/Palladium. In fact, you never reply when I ask you to explain a DRM system compatible with free software and general purpose computing. I don't think you have an answer to it. Reply to my old message or in my journal if you want to discuss more.
You've got to get that black open cell foam stuff that is used for air filtration. The only place I have found to buy this in bulk is the Grainger catalog, it's about $25 for a lifetime supply. It's a pretty big roll, I think it is 25 feet by 5 feet when you unroll it. Anyway, get quarter inch.
The airflow loss is minimal, but you have to clean them every couple months, or you will start to lose a lot of airflow. The stuff is washable. If you smoke around your computers, figure on cleaning them a lot more often. Running a normal room air filter in the same room helps with the dust and smoke.
Carpet is a big dust trap, carpeted rooms seem to be a lot more dusty on average, especially if your computer is on the floor.
Anyway, here is an example of that black stuff mounted in front of fans.
http://www.bedford.smythco.com/storage/5.jpg
Evercase from newegg comes with a processor overhead fan that has the stuff. I've also found some hobby shops selling small pieces of the stuff for high prices, but as I said, grainger is the best place to buy it in bulk.
I think a lot of what may seem a flame war is actually productive discussion. The LKML has a really pretty nice way of having productive conversations that sometimes border on flame wars. Between Linus and Alan Cox, things usually seem to head in reasonable directions, even if they start out badly. Of course, any one message taken out of a thread may seem pretty bad, but it's important to follow the threads through to the end to get the whole picture.
What's not portable about a computer that fits in your briefcase?
It looks like rather than laptops becoming standardized (i.e. build one from scratch), full size computers are going to shrink to form what basically becomes a standardized laptop.
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This has nothing to do with cellphone handsets. They are going to use the echos from the towers to construct radar images.
I do agree with you that it would be pretty difficult to identify a particular person via a radar signal.
I'm pretty sure they are using the echos from the base stations, not from the phones.
Would be a way to sneak in speeding tickets with no extra roadside equipment except a camera to identify the speeder.
A related use would be to tell cops where "speeding hot spots" are, so they can go hide there.
Really, this technology doesn't scare me very much. It's nothing they couldn't already do. Even the Libertarian in me has a hard time getting too riled up over this. There are bigger battles to fight than this.
Also, for some reason a whole lot of "single site" or "very limited distribution" stuff gets on bugtraq.
There are about 6 million php blog/message board packages out there, and 5.99 million of them are coded with no security in mind. I probably get 5 messages a week that are just some stupid SQL injection attack to fooPHPblogger 0.59 alpha.
I'm sure that if you count all that stuff, Linux looks much worse off.
Playing devil's advocate here but....
MS could have documentation that is just as good, and contextual like a squid conf file.
The problem is that people stop clicking the question mark cursor (contextual help) after doing it about 10 times and getting "This is a text box, you enter text into it" or "click the check box to toggle this option on or off".
So, IMO, it's not so much that they can't, it's that they don't.
Uhh... Why would you drink photo-grade sodium thiosulfate? Why not go to a hospital and get treatment with USP grade drugs?
I still have not seen you show the GPL to restrict "use" of the software, your argument seems to be that "distribution" is a "use", which is pretty weak, a word game.
The definitions of "use" and "distribution" that are commonly used in relation to the GPL, are the same ones that are under copyright law. Basically, suppose the software were distributed "All Rights Reserved", with no license for use, only the fully restricted copyright. Anything that you could do legally without special permission from the author in the "All Rights Reserved" case, are things you can do without agreeing to the GPL.
This includes using the software, insofar as running the software, which produces a temporary copy in RAM. You would own any output of the program, so long as the output from the program did not contain substantial portions of the program's own source. (That only happens in rare cases)
You would be restricted from any redistribution of the software by normal copyright laws. The GPL is your sole grant to redistribution, and only comes into play when you would be getting into territory that is covered by normal copyright law.
Be careful, their constitution offer no guarantees of freedom. Their freedom is solely by the good graces of their government, and could be removed at any time.
:)
As opposed to the US, where our constitution guarantees freedom, and congress just ignores it most of the time.
I should qualify my statement, in my opinion, McVoy is an idiot for calling his target customers "whiners".
:)
I did not mean that as a general statement about his intelligence.
The rest of your points are taken, although I still do not agree with the BKL, I find it an intolerable license, and it scares me that kernel development is happening in BK.
The GPL doesn't restrict how you use the software, only how you can distribute it.
In fact, you don't have to agree to the GPL at all unless you want to distribute GPL software in some form.
. If you want to use, say, [GPL'd] Readline in your program, then your program must be licensed under the GPL
Yep, because then you are no longer just using the software, you are distributing it, in part, which means you have to agree with and abide by the GPL. When you link to the library (at least statically), you include parts of the code in your program. Dynamically linking is a little less clear cut, but generally, you are still distributing a work that is derived from GPL code.
Most libraries are LGPL anyway, which doesn't have this restriction.
Let's say I wrote some serious mathematical library software, and released it for general use. And let's say that the license I wrote included a clause that said the government of the People's Republic of China may not use my software for the purposes of decrypting communications.
Yes, any EULA that restricts the rights of the end user in ways other than distribution is potentially very dangerous.
But people everyday here write how they oppose protections for copyrighted material like movies and music.
Don't mind those people. Also don't assume that people who advocate free software are always of that belief. We aren't all communist. I'd even go as far to say the real communists are in the minority.
I admit there is a lot wrong with our current system of copyright, but I am not in favor of eliminating it, and I don't think many reasonable people are. Most of us do want to see widespread IP reform, but eliminating all IP is not the goal for most of us.
Plenty of companies don't have repugnant EULAs that restrict how you use their software.
Note that this is very different from the normal EULA that disclaims liability and describes how many computers you are allowed to install the program on, and things like that.
Look, it is as simple as this: you don't like the copy protection, patent protection, whatever you have every choice NOT to buy or watch or listen to a product
All Stallman is doing in this case is showing people the consequences of choosing to use this product.
No one (no reasonable person at least) is expecting or asking McVoy to open source his product. Sure, it would be a good way to end this mess, but it's more reasonable to just stop using his closed product.
No one ever said you couldn't use closed source software, we just want to make sure that people understand the inherent risk in any closed solution with bad EULAs.
Lip service and actual changes to the license are two different things.
Besides, McVoy has shown that his company cannot be trusted. Any company that would seek to restrict your how you use their software is pretty slimy.
BK is not preventing Redhat, Suse, Mandrake (et al) employees from using BitKeeper, only those who actively develop Subversion or arch
It's not that they are, it's that they could.
EULAs that dictate terms of use of software (as opposed to EULAs that only address distribution), and companies that support those kind of EULAs, and a very dangerous thing.
That is Stallman's point.
Calling your customer "whiners" is always a sure bet.
Larry McVoy of BitKeeper:
"Our position:
"1) No free licenses for our competition, they can buy them if they like.
"2) The software is not open source because the open source business model doesn't have a prayer of supporting the development costs.
"3) If you had built a decent system instead of sitting around and whining, we could be doing something else instead of sitting around listening to your whining."
He doesn't give a flying fuck about open source, he only wants to sell his product. People like this are the opposite of the open source philosophy.
Stallman was sort of out of place bringing this up again on the LKML, which is supposed to be about technical discussion, but his points are, as always, valid.
You are correct, and also, executables will be larger in RAM in a truely RISC environment, since more instructions are required to accomplish the same thing.
Crap man, you know how big the Grainger catalog is? :)
:)
OK, here
Grainger Item#:
5W913
In stock, at least until I post this message
I used to know this, but the naming convention came around sometime in the early 50s or late 40s. There were A, B, C, D dry cells, and then those big tall 8 inch ones that were about 2 inches around, they had some name also. I believe it was set up by the government in some capacity, possibly the military. Could be wrong.
As far as why "A" then "AA", then "AAA" this probably comes from the way that guages are measured. As guage gets larger, you get closer to 0, then you have 00, 000, 0000. It was probably the same line of thought that cause the creater of the first battery smaller than the A to name it AA. Just speculation, but it makes sense.
This link explains what happened to the "B" cell:
http://exn.ca/Stories/1998/06/16/51.asp
Couldn't find much else on Google, because battery is such a common word, and "dry cell" gets you lots of biology links.
BTW-
You never replied to my message about DRM/Palladium. In fact, you never reply when I ask you to explain a DRM system compatible with free software and general purpose computing. I don't think you have an answer to it. Reply to my old message or in my journal if you want to discuss more.
You've got to get that black open cell foam stuff that is used for air filtration. The only place I have found to buy this in bulk is the Grainger catalog, it's about $25 for a lifetime supply. It's a pretty big roll, I think it is 25 feet by 5 feet when you unroll it. Anyway, get quarter inch.
The airflow loss is minimal, but you have to clean them every couple months, or you will start to lose a lot of airflow. The stuff is washable. If you smoke around your computers, figure on cleaning them a lot more often. Running a normal room air filter in the same room helps with the dust and smoke.
Carpet is a big dust trap, carpeted rooms seem to be a lot more dusty on average, especially if your computer is on the floor.
Anyway, here is an example of that black stuff mounted in front of fans.
http://www.bedford.smythco.com/storage/5.jpg
Evercase from newegg comes with a processor overhead fan that has the stuff. I've also found some hobby shops selling small pieces of the stuff for high prices, but as I said, grainger is the best place to buy it in bulk.
I think a lot of what may seem a flame war is actually productive discussion. The LKML has a really pretty nice way of having productive conversations that sometimes border on flame wars. Between Linus and Alan Cox, things usually seem to head in reasonable directions, even if they start out badly. Of course, any one message taken out of a thread may seem pretty bad, but it's important to follow the threads through to the end to get the whole picture.
What's not portable about a computer that fits in your briefcase?
It looks like rather than laptops becoming standardized (i.e. build one from scratch), full size computers are going to shrink to form what basically becomes a standardized laptop.
So basically, we go back to the AT standard :)